Unsure to Unstoppable: Watch Sam’s Story Biology Major
Sam grew up with a deep love for the outdoors, spending much of her childhood outside and exploring nature. Unsure of her path after high school, she began her college journey at UW-Green Bay, Manitowoc Campus, taking general education classes. Her Biology class, and upon learning more from Biology professors, Sam secured an internship with the ‘Stream Team.’ Sam enjoyed the hands-on water monitoring, lab analysis, and the impactful role she could play in improving the environment.
This experience sparked her ability to combine her love of nature with the study of biology at UW-Green Bay. https://www.uwgb.edu/biology
Transcript: When I was coming out of high school I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I decided the UW-Green Bay Manitowoc Campus and two professors that had a huge impact on my, you know future career. Cuz I got an internship with them and that Stream internship then led me to really love the Field of Biology and that’s where I am now. It’s just really awesome because I’ve always been in outdoorsy person. I love being outside. When I was a kid, I was always outside, climbing in the trees and everything. In Stream Team we went out into the field and we would collect these samples and you get to come back and be in a lab and like see the fulfillment of like, yeah, we’re doing this monitoring to actually better the earth in some way and better Lake Michigan. As a Biology student on the Green Bay Campus, our labs are outside in our own campus and I think that’s an amazing thing, we’re lucky to have here. My favorite Biology Lab was the Ecology Lab so we were outside as much as possible. We made some leaf packs for invertebrates to see how different invertebrates colonize different species of leaf packs in streams. So as a Biology student, you learn lots of cell biology, molecular. You get to work in the classroom with amazing professors and then you also get to work in a lab. Going outside, taking samples bringing them back to the lab, analyzing. And for me, that’s what I’ve really learned best how to do through internships and through classes, is taking that data that you collected and connecting it to the bigger picture. My aspirations for what I would want to do with the rest of my life would be able to be in an area where I could be working in a park and teaching people, educating people about the nature that’s around them. That would be amazing.
